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Astronomy

The dark, high-pressure depths of Earth’s interior is an unexpected place to find life. Now, an international group of scientists report there’s 16.5 to 25 billion tons of micro-organisms beneath the planet’s surface. The team’s work is redefining what a habitable environment is.
The discoveries “force us to reimagine what the boundaries are that life can exist in,” said Karen Lloyd, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Deep Discovery

Mars continues to put on a nice show these December evenings. The Red Planet appears nearly halfway to the zenith in the southern sky as twilight fades to darkness. The ruddy world shines at magnitude 0.1, as bright as any other early evening object, against the faint backdrop of Aquarius the Water-bearer.
As you gaze at Mars with your naked eye, you might assume it’s the only object of interest in the area. But target the planet through binoculars or a telescope and you’ll also see

Planet Hunting
In a vast cloud of dust and gas 450 light-years from Earth in the Taurus constellation, scientists have found evidence of a treasure trove of super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of researchers conducted a study of young stars in a gaseous, star-forming region of Taurus. The team observed and imaged 32 stars in the region that are surrounded by protoplanetary disks — rotating disks of dust and gas that surro

Mars continues to put on a nice show these December evenings. The Red Planet appears nearly halfway to the zenith in the southern sky as twilight fades to darkness.
The ruddy world shines at magnitude 0.1, as bright as any other early evening object, against the faint backdrop of Aquarius the Water-bearer.
As you gaze at Mars with your naked eye, you might assume it’s the only object of interest in the area. But target the planet through binoculars or a telescope and you’ll also

If orbiting just 4 million miles from your fiery host star wasn’t bad enough, things might have just gotten even worse.
New research shows that stars emitting high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation could strip the atmospheres of their ultra-close exoplanets. While observing gas giants that orbit exceptionally close to their host stars, astronomers found that those bombarded with radiation were losing helium from their atmospheres. These results, which were published in multiple studies

Future of spaceflight
The upcoming year is shaping up to be a big one for private spaceflight. A number of big players in the race to get paying passengers to space seem poised to actually make that happen, and companies like Boeing and SpaceX have announced a number of ambitious goals.
It looks like they might be beat by the Brit, though. Last week, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson claimed that his company Virgin Galactic will send astronauts into space by Christmas of this year. Branso